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Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )

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Well, it's Tuesday again, but this time, today we had our third big storage launch of 2009! A lot got announced today as part of IBM's big "Dynamic Infrastructure" marketing campaign. I will just focus on the
disk-related announcements today:

IBM System Storage DS8700

IBM adds a new model to its DS8000 series with the
[IBM System Storage DS8700]. Earlier this month, fellow blogger and arch-nemesis Barry Burke from EMC posted [R.I.P DS8300] on this mistaken assumption that the new DS8700 meant that DS8300 was going away, or that anyone who bought a DS8300 recently would be out of luck. Obviously, I could not respond until today's announcement, as the last thing I want to do is lose my job disclosing confidential information. BarryB is wrong on both counts:

IBM will continue to sell the DS8100 and DS8300, in addition to the new DS8700.

Clients can upgrade their existing DS8100 or DS8300 systems to DS8700.

BarryB's latest post [What's In a Name - DS8700] is fair game, given all the fun and ridicule everyone had at his expense over EMC's "V-Max" name.

So the DS8700 is new hardware with only 4 percent new software. On the hardware side, it uses faster POWER6 processors instead of POWER5+, has faster PCI-e buses instead of the RIO-G loops, and faster four-port device adapters (DAs) for added bandwidth between cache and drives. The DS8700 can be ordered as a single-frame dual 2-way that supports up to 128 drives and 128GB of cache, or as a dual 4-way, consisting of one primary frame, and up to four expansion frames, with up to 384GB of cache and 1024 drives.

Not mentioned explicitly in the announcements were the things the DS8700 does not support:

ESCON attachment - Now that FICON is well-established for the mainframe market, there is no need to support the slower, bulkier ESCON options. This greatly reduced testing effort. The 2-way DS8700 can support up to 16 four-port FICON/FCP host adapters, and the 4-way can support up to 32 host adapters, for a maximum of 128 ports. The FICON/FCP host adapter ports can auto-negotiate between 4Gbps, 2Gbps and 1Gbps as needed.

LPAR mode - When IBM and HDS introduced LPAR mode back in 2004, it sounded like a great idea the engineers came up with. Most other major vendors followed our lead to offer similar "partitioning". However, it turned out to be what we call in the storage biz a "selling apple" not a "buying apple". In other words, something the salesman can offer as a differentiating feature, but that few clients actually use. It turned out that supporting both LPAR and non-LPAR modes merely doubled the testing effort, so IBM got rid of it for the DS8700.

Update: I have been reminded that both IBM and HDS delivered LPAR mode within a month of each other back in 2004, so it was wrong for me to imply that HDS followed IBM's lead when obviously development happened in both companies for the most part concurrently prior to that. EMC was late to the "partition" party, but who's keeping track?

Initial performance tests show up to 50 percent improvement for random workloads, and up to 150 percent improvement for sequential workloads, and up to 60 percent improvement in background data movement for FlashCopy functions. The results varied slightly between Fixed Block (FB) LUNs and Count-Key-Data (CKD) volumes, and I hope to see some SPC-1 and SPC-2 benchmark numbers published soon.

The DS8700 is compatible for Metro Mirror, Global Mirror, and Metro/Global Mirror with the rest of the DS8000 series, as well as the ESS model 750, ESS model 800 and DS6000 series.

New 600GB FC and FDE drives

IBM now offers [600GB drives] for the DS4700 and DS5020 disk systems, as well as the EXP520 and EXP810 expansion drawers. In each case, we are able to pack up to 16 drives into a 3U enclosure.

Personally, I think the DS5020 should have been given a DS4xxx designation, as it resembles the DS4700
more than the other models of the DS5000 series. Back in 2006-2007, I was the marketing strategist for IBM System Storage product line, and part of my job involved all of the meetings to name or rename products. Mostly I gave reasons why products should NOT be renamed, and why it was important to name the products correctly at the beginning.

IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller hardware and software

Fellow IBM master inventory Barry Whyte has been covering the latest on the [SVC 2145-CF8 hardware]. IBM put out a press release last week on this, and today is the formal announcement with prices and details. Barry's latest post
[SVC CF8 hardware and SSD in depth] covers just part of the entire
announcement.

The other part of the announcement was the [SVC 5.1 software] which can be loaded
on earlier SVC models 8F2, 8F4, and 8G4 to gain better performance and functionality.

To avoid confusion on what is hardware machine type/model (2145-CF8 or 2145-8A4) and what is software program (5639-VC5 or 5639-VW2), IBM has introduced two new [Solution Offering Identifiers]:

5465-028 Standard SAN Volume Controller

5465-029 Entry Edition SAN Volume Controller

The latter is designed for smaller deployments, supports only a single SVC node-pair managing up to
150 disk drives, available in Raven Black or Flamingo Pink.

EXN3000 and EXP5060 Expansion Drawers

IBM offers the [EXN3000 for the IBM N series]. These expansion drawers can pack 24 drives in a 4U enclosure. The drives can either be all-SAS, or all-SATA, supporting 300GB, 450GB, 500GB and 1TB size capacity drives.

The [EXP5060 for the IBM DS5000 series] is a high-density expansion drawer that can pack up to 60 drives into a 4U enclosure. A DS5100 or DS5300
can handle up to eight of these expansion drawers, for a total of 480 drives.

Pre-installed with Tivoli Storage Productivity Center Basic Edition. Basic Edition can be upgraded with license keys to support Data, Disk and Standard Edition to extend support and functionality to report and manage XIV, N series, and non-IBM disk systems.

Pre-installed with Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager (TKLM). This can be used to manage the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) encryption-capable disk drives in the DS8000 and DS5000, as well as LTO and TS1100 series tape drives.

The new product has some excellent advantages. FlashCopy Manager offers application-aware backup of LUNs containing SAP, Oracle, DB2, SQL server and Microsoft Exchange data. It can support IBM DS8000, SVC and XIV point-in-time copy functions, as well as the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) interfaces of the IBM DS5000, DS4000 and DS3000 series disk systems. It is priced by the amount of TB you copy, not on the speed or number of CPU processors inside the server.

Don't let the name fool you. IBM FlashCopy Manager does not require that you use Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) as your backup product. You can run IBM FlashCopy Manager on its own, and it will manage your FlashCopy target versions on disk, and these can be backed up to tape or another disk using any backup product. However, if you are lucky enough to also be using TSM, then there is optional integration that allows TSM to manage the target copies, move them to tape, inventory them in its DB2 database, and provide complete reporting.

Yup, that's a lot to announce in one day. And this was just the disk-related portion of the launch!

I haven't even finished blogging about all the other stuff that got announced last week, and here we are with more announcements. Since IBM's big [Pulse 2010 Conference] is next week, I thought I would cover this week's announcement on Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) v6.2 release. Here are the highlights:

Client-Side Data Deduplication

This is sometimes referred to as "source-side" deduplication, as storage admins can get confused on which servers are clients in a TSM client-server deployment. The idea is to identify duplicates at the TSM client node, before sending to the TSM server. This is done at the block level, so even files that are similar but not identical, such as slight variations from a master copy, can benefit. The dedupe process is based on a shared index across all clients, and the TSM server, so if you have a file that is similar to a file on a different node, the duplicate blocks that are identical in both would be deduplicated.

This feature is available for both backup and archive data, and can also be useful for archives using the IBM System Storage Archive Manager (SSAM) v6.2 interface.

Simplified management of Server virtualization

TSM 6.2 improves its support of VMware guests by adding auto-discovery. Now, when you spontaneously create a new virtual machine OS guest image, you won't have to tell TSM, it will discover this automatically! TSM's legendary support of VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) now eliminates the manual process of keeping track of guest images. TSM also added support of the Vstorage API for file level backup and recovery.

While IBM is the #1 reseller of VMware, we also support other forms of server virtualization. In this release, IBM adds support for Microsoft Hyper-V, including support using Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS).

Automated Client Deployment

Do you have clients at all different levels of TSM backup-archive client code deployed all over the place? TSM v6.2 can upgrade these clients up to the latest client level automatically, using push technology, from any client running v5.4 and above. This can be scheduled so that only certain clients are upgraded at a time.

Simultaneous Background Tasks

The TSM server has many background administrative tasks:

Migration of data from one storage pool to another, based on policies, such as moving backups and archives on a disk pool over to a tape pools to make room for new incoming data.

Storage pool backup, typically data on a disk pool is copied to a tape pool to be kept off-site.

Copy active data. In TSM terminology, if you have multiple backup versions, the most recent version is called the active version, and the older versions are called inactive. TSM can copy just the active versions to a separate, smaller disk pool.

In previous releases, these were done one at a time, so it could make for a long service window. With TSM v6.2, these three tasks are now run simultaneously, in parallel, so that they all get done in less time, greatly reducing the server maintenance window, and freeing up tape drives for incoming backup and archive data. Often, the same file on a disk pool is going to be processed by two or more of these scheduled tasks, so it makes sense to read it once and do all the copies and migrations at one time while the data is in buffer memory.

Enhanced Security during Data Transmission

Previous releases of TSM offered secure in-flight transmission of data for Windows and AIX clients. This security uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) with 256-bit AES encryption. With TSM v6.2, this feature is expanded to support Linux, HP-UX and Solaris.

Improved support for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications

I remember back when we used to call these TDPs (Tivoli Data Protectors). TSM for ERP allows backup of ERP applications, seemlessly integrating with database-specific tools like IBM DB2, Oracle RMAN, and SAP BR*Tools. This allows one-to-many and many-to-one configurations between SAP servers and TSM servers. In other words, you can have one SAP server backup to several TSM servers, or several SAP servers backup to a single TSM server. This is done by splitting up data bases into "sub-database objects", and then process each object separately. This can be extremely helpful if you have databases over 1TB in size. In the event that backing up an object fails and has to be re-started, it does not impact the backup of the other objects.

If you think this is the first time a company like IBM has pulled shenanigans with product names like this, think again. Here are a few posts that might refresh your memory:

In my September 2006 post, [A brand by any other name...] I explain that I started blogging specifically to promote the new "IBM System Storage" product line name, part of the "IBM Systems" brand resulting from merging the "eServer" and "TotalStorage' brands.

In my February 2008 post, [Getting Off the Island], I cover how the x/p/i/z designations came about for our various IBM server product lines.

But what about acquisitions? When [IBM acquired Lotus Development Corporation], it kept the "Lotus" brand. New products that fit the "collaboration" function were put under the Lotus brand. I think most people can accept this approach.

But have we ever seen an existing product renamed to an acquired name?

In my post January 2009 post
[Congratulations to Ken on your QCC Milestone], I mentioned that my colleague Ken Hannigan worked on an internal project initially called "Workstation Data Save Facility" (WDSF) which was changed to "Data Facility Distributed Storage Manager" (DFDSM), then renamed to "ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager" (ADSM), and finally renamed to the name it has today: IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

Readers reminded me that [IBM acquired Tivoli Systems, Inc.] in 1996, so TSM could not have been an internally developed product. Ha! Wrong! Let's take a quick history lesson on how this came about:

In the late 1980s, IBM Almaden research had developed a project to backup personal computers and workstations, which they called "Workstation Data Save Facility" or WDSF.

This was turned over to our development team, which immediately discarded the code, and wrote from scratch its replacmeent, called Data Facility Distributed Storage Manager (DFDSM), named similar to the Data Facility products on the mainframe (DFP, DFHSM, DFDSS). As a member of the Data Facility family, DFDSM didn't really fit. The rest processed mainframe data sets, but DFDSM processed Windows and UNIX files. That a version of DFDSM server was available to run on the mainframe was the only connection.

Then, in the early 1990s, there were discussions of possibly splitting IBM into a bunch of smaller "Baby Blues", similar to how [AT&T was split into "Baby Bells"], and how Forbes and Goldman Sachs now want to split Microsoft into [Baby Bills]. IBM considered naming the storage spin-off as ADSTAR, which stood for "Advanced Storage and Retrieval."
Pre-emptively, IBM renamed DFDSM to "ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager" or ADSM.

Fortunately, in 1993, IBM brought a new sheriff to town, Lou Gerstner, who quickly squashed any plans to split up IBM. He quickly realized that IBM's core strength was building integrated stacks, combining systems, software and services to solve business problems.

In 1996, IBM acquired Tivoli Systems, Inc. to expand its "Systems Management" portfolio, and renamed ADSM over to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, since "storage management" is an essential part of "systems management". Later, IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center would be renamed to "IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center."

I participated in five months of painful meetings to figure out what to name our new internally-developed midrange disk system. Since it ran SAN Volume Controller software, I pushed for keeping the SVC designation somehow. We considered DS naming convention, but the new midrange product would not fit between our existing DS5000 and DS6000 numbering scheme. A marketing agency we hired came up with nonsensical names, in the spirit of product names like Celerra, Centera and CLARiiON, using name generators like [Wordoid]. Luckily, in the nick of time, IBM acquired Storwize for its compression technology, and decided that Storwize as a name was way better fit than any of the names we came up with already.

However, the new IBM Storwize V7000 midrange product had nothing in common with the appliances acquired from Storwize, the company, so to avoid confusion, the latter products were renamed to [IBM Real-time Compression]. Fellow blogger Steven Kenniston, the Storage Alchemist from Storwize fame now part of IBM from the acquisition, gives his perspective on this in his post [Storwize – What is in a Name, Really?]. While I am often critical of the names and terms IBM uses, I have to say this last set of naming decisions makes a lot of sense to me and I support it wholeheartedly.

By combining multiple components into a single "integrated system", IBM can offer a blended disk-and-tape storage solutions. This provides the best of both worlds, high speed access using disk, while providing lower costs and more energy efficiency with tape. According to a study by the Clipper Group, tape can be 23 times less expensive than disk over a 5 year total cost of ownership (TCO).

I've also covered Hierarchical Storage Management, such as my post [Seven Tiers of Storage at ABN Amro], and my role as lead architect for DFSMS on z/OS in general, and DFSMShsm in particular.

However, some explanation might be warranted in the use of these two terms in regards to SONAS. In this case, ILM refers to policy-based file placement, movement and expiration on internal disk pools. This is actually a GPFS feature that has existed for some time, and was tested to work in this new configuration. Files can be individually placed on either SAS (15K RPM) or SATA (7200 RPM) drives. Policies can be written to move them from SAS to SATA based on size, age and days non-referenced.

HSM is also a form of ILM, in that it moves data from SONAS disk to external storage pools managed by IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. A small stub is left behind in the GPFS file system indicating the file has been "migrated". Any reference to read or update this file will cause the file to be "recalled" back from TSM to SONAS for processing. The external storage pools can be disk, tape or any other media supported by TSM. Some estimate that as much as 60 to 80 percent of files on NAS have low reference and should be stored on tape instead of disk, and now SONAS with HSM makes that possible.

This distinction allows the ILM movement to be done internally, within GPFS, and the HSM movement to be done externally, via TSM. Both ILM and HSM movement take advantage of the GPFS high-speed policy engine, which can process 10 million files per node, run in parallel across all interface nodes. Note that TSM is not required for ILM movement. In effect, SONAS brings the policy-based management features of DFSMS for z/OS mainframe to all the rest of the operating systems that access SONAS.

HTTP and NIS support

In addition to NFS v2, NFS v3, and CIFS, the SONAS v1.1.1 adds the HTTP protocol. Over time, IBM plans to add more protocols in subsequent releases. Let me know which protocols you are interested in, so I can pass that along to the architects designing future releases!

SONAS v1.1.1 also adds support for Network Information Service (NIS), a client/server based model for user administration. In SONAS, NIS is used for netgroup and ID mapping only. Authentication is done via Active Directory, LDAP or Samba PDC.

Asynchronous Replication

SONAS already had synchronous replication, which was limited in distance. Now, SONAS v1.1.1 provides asynchronous replication, using rsync, at the file level. This is done over Wide Area Network (WAN) across to any other SONAS at any distance.

Hardware enhancements

Interface modules can now be configured with either 64GB or 128GB of cache. Storage now supports both 450GB and 600GB SAS (15K RPM) and both 1TB and 2TB SATA (7200 RPM) drives. However, at this time, an entire 60-drive drawer must be either all one type of SAS or all one type of SATA. I have been pushing the architects to allow each 10-pack RAID rank to be independently selectable. For now, a storage pod can have 240 drives, 60 drives of each type of disk, to provide four different tiers of storage. You can have up to 30 storage pods per SONAS, for a total of 7200 drives.

An alternative to internal drawers of disk is a new "Gateway" iRPQ that allows the two storage nodes of a SONAS storage pod to connect via Fibre Channel to one or two XIV disk systems. You cannot mix and match, a storage pod is either all internal disk, or all external XIV. A SONAS gateway combined with external XIV is referred to as a "Smart Business Storage Cloud" (SBSC), which can be configured off premises and managed by third-party personnel so your IT staff can focus on other things.

See the Announcement Letters for the SONAS [hardware] and [software] for more details.

For those who are wondering how this positions against IBM's other NAS solution, the IBM System Storage N series, the rule of thumb is simple. If your capacity needs can be satisfied with a single N series box per location, use that. If not, consider SONAS instead. For those with non-IBM NAS filers that realize now that SONAS is a better approach, IBM offers migration services.

Both the Information Archive and the SONAS can be accessed from z/OS or Linux on System z mainframe, from "IBM i", AIX and Linux on POWER systems, all x86-based operating systems that run on System x servers, as well as any non-IBM server that has a supported NAS client.

Every year, I teach hundreds of sellers how to sell IBM storage products. I have been doing this since the late 1990s, and it is one task that has carried forward from one job to another as I transitioned through various roles from development, to marketing, to consulting.

This week, I am in the city of Taipei [Taipei] to teach Top Gun sales class, part of IBM's [Sales Training] curriculum. This is only my second time here on the island of Taiwan.

As you can see from this photo, Taipei is a large city with just row after row of buildings. The metropolitan area has about seven million people, and I saw lots of construction for more on my ride in from the airport.

The student body consists of IBM Business Partners and field sales reps eager to learn how to become better sellers. Typically, some of the students might have just been hired on, just finished IBM Sales School, a few might have transferred from selling other product lines, while others are established storage sellers looking for a refresher on the latest solutions and technologies.

I am part of the teach team comprised of seven instructors from different countries. Here is what the week entails for me:

Monday - I will present "Selling Scale-Out NAS Solutions" that covers the IBM SONAS appliance and gateway configurations, and be part of a panel discussion on Disk with several other experts.

Friday - The students will present their "Team Value Workshop" presentations, and the class concludes with a formal graduation ceremony for the subset of students who pass. A few outstanding students will be honored with "Top Gun" status.

These are the solution areas I present most often as a consultant at the IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson, so I can provide real-life stories of different client situations to help illustrate my examples.

The weather here in Taipei calls for rain every day! I was able to take this photo on Sunday morning while it was still nice and clear, but later in the afternoon, we had quite the downpour. I am glad I brought my raincoat!

This Thursday, June 16, 2011, marks IBM's Centennial 100 year anniversary. It happens to also be my 25th anniversary with IBM Storage. To avoid conflicts in celebrations, we decided to celebrate my induction into the "Quarter Century Club" (QCC) last Friday instead.

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My colleague Harley Puckett was master of ceremonies. Here he is presenting me with a memorial plaque and keychain. Harley mentioned a few facts about 1986, the year I started working for IBM. Ronald Reagan was the US President, gasoline cost only 93 cents per gallon, and the US National Debt was only 2 trillion US dollars!

Here are my colleagues from DFSMShsm. From left to right: Ninh Le, Henry Valenzuela, Shannon Gallaher, and Stan Kissinger. I started in 1986 as aa software developer on DFHSM, and slowly worked my way up to be a lead architect of DFSMS.

Here are my colleagues from Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM). From left to right: Matt Anglin, Ken Hannigan and Mark Haye. I first met them when they worked in DFDSS, having moved from San Jose, CA down to Tucson. While I never worked on the TSM code itself, I did co-author some of the patents used in the product and other products like the 3494 Virtual Tape Server that makes use of TSM internally. I also traveled extensively to promote TSM, often with a TSM developer tagging along so they can learn the ropes about how to travel and make presentaitons.

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Here are my colleagues from the disk team. From left to right: Joe Bacco, Carlos Pratt, Gary Albert, and Siebo Friesenborg. I worked on the SMI-S interface for the ESS 800 and DS8000 disk systems needed for the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center. Joe leads the "Disk Magic" tools team. Carlos and I worked on qualifying the various disk products to run with Linux on System z host attachment. Gary Albert is the Business Line Executive (BLE) of Enterprise Disk. Siebo Friesenborg was a disk expert on performance and disaster recovery, but is now enjoying his retirement.

Here are my colleagues from the support team. From left to right: Max Smith, Dave Reed, and Greg McBride. I used to work in Level 2 Support for DFSMS with Max and Dave, carrying a pager and managing the queue on RETAIN. We had enough people so that each Level 2 only had to carry the pager two weeks per year. On Monday afternoons, the person with the pager would give it to the next person on the rotation. On Monday, September 10, 2001, I got the pager, and the following morning, it went off to help all the many clients affected by the September 11 tragedy.

I worked with Greg McBride when he was in DFSMS System Data Mover (SDM), and then again in Tivoli Storage Productivity Center for Replication (TPC-R), and now he is supporting IBM Scale-Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS).

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Standing in the light blue striped shirt is Greg Van Hise, my first office-mate and mentor when I first joined IBM. He went on to be part of the elite "DFHSM 2.4.0" prima donna team, then move on to be an architect for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM).

I wasn't limited to inviting just coworkers, I was also able to invite friends and family. Here are Monica, Richard, and my mother. Normally, my parents head south for the summer, but they postponed their flights so that they could participate in my QCC celebration.

From left to right: my father, Greg Tevis, and myself. It was pure coincidence that my father would wear a loud darkly patterned shirt like mine. Honestly, we did not plan this in advance. Greg Tevis and I were lead architects for the Tivoli Storage Productivity Center, and Greg is now the Technology Strategist for the Tivoli Storage product line.

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Here is Jack Arnold, fellow subject matter expert who works with me here at the Tucson Executive Briefing Center, sampling the food. We had quite the spread, including egg rolls, meatballs, luncheon meats, chicken strips, and fresh vegetables.

More colleagues from the Tucson Executive Briefing Center, from left to right, Joe Hayward, Lee Olguin, and Shelly Jost. Joe was a subject matter expert on Tape when I first joioned the EBC in 2007, but he has moved back to the Tape development/test team. Lee is our master "Gunny" sargeant to manage all of our briefing schedules. Shelly is our Client Support Manager, and was the one who organized all the food and preparations for this event!

Lastly, here are Brad Johns, myself, and Harley Puckett. Brad was my mentor for my years in Marketing, and has since retired from IBM and now works on his golf game. I would like to thank all of the Tucson EBC staff for pulling off such a great event, and all my coworkers, friends and family for coming out to celebrate this milestone in my career!

In addition to the plaque and keychain, Harley presented me with a book of congratulatory letters. If you would like to send a letter, it's not too late, contact Mysti Wood (mysti@us.ibm.com).

In my last blog post [Full Disk Encryption for Your Laptop] explained my decisions relating to Full-Disk Encryption (FDE) for my laptop. Wrapping up my week's theme of Full-Disk Encryption, I thought I would explain the steps involved to make it happen.

Last April, I switched from running Windows and Linux dual-boot, to one with Linux running as the primary operating system, and Windows running as a Linux KVM guest. I have Full Disk Encryption (FDE) implemented using Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS).

Here were the steps involved for encrypting my Thinkpad T410:

Step 0: Backup my System

Long-time readers know how I feel about taking backups. In my blog post [Separating Programs from Data], I emphasized this by calling it "Step 0". I backed up my system three ways:

Backed up all of my documents and home user directory with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

Backed up all of my files, including programs, bookmarks and operating settings, to an external disk drive (I used rsync for this). If you have a lot of bookmarks on your browser, there are ways to dump these out to a file to load them back in the later step.

Clonezilla allows me to do a "Bare Machine Recovery" of my laptop back to its original dual-boot state in less than an hour, in case I need to start all over again.

Step 1: Re-Partition the Drive

"Full Disk Encryption" is a slight misnomer. For external drives, like the Maxtor BlackArmor from Seagate (Thank you Allen!), there is a small unencrypted portion that contains the encryption/decryption software to access the rest of the drive. Internal boot drives for laptops work the same way. I created two partitions:

A small unencrypted partition (2 GB) to hold the Master Boot Record [MBR], Grand Unified Bootlloader [GRUB], and the /boot directory. Even though there is no sensitive information on this partition, it is still protected the "old way" with the hard-drive password in the BIOS.

The rest of the drive (318GB) will be one big encrypted Logical Volume Manager [LVM] container, often referred to as a "Physical Volume" in LVM terminology.

Having one big encrypted partition means I only have to enter my ridiculously-long encryption password once during boot-up.

Step 2: Create Logical Volumes in the LVM container

I create three logical volumes on the encrypted physical container: swap, slash (/) directory, and home (/home). Some might question the logic behind putting swap space on an encrypted container. In theory, swap could contain sensitive information after a system [hybernation]. I separated /home from slash(/) so that in the event I completely fill up my home directory, I can still boot up my system.

Step 3: Install Linux

Ideally, I would have lifted my Linux partition "as is" for the primary OS, and a Physical-to-Virtual [P2V] conversion of my Windows image for the guest VM. Ha! To get the encryption, it was a lot simpler to just install Linux from scratch, so I did that.

Step 4: Install Windows guest KVM image

The folks in our "Open Client for Linux" team made this step super-easy. Select Windows XP or Windows 7, and press the "Install" button. This is a fresh install of the Windows operating system onto a 30GB "raw" image file.

(Note: Since my Thinkpad T410 is Intel-based, I had to turn on the 'Intel (R) Virtualization Technology' option in the BIOS!)

There are only a few programs that I need to run on Windows, so I installed them here in this step.

Step 5: Set up File Sharing between Linux and Windows

In my dual-boot set up, I had a separate "D:" drive that I could access from either Windows or Linux, so that I would only have to store each file once. For this new configuration, all of my files will be in my home directory on Linux, and then shared to the Windows guest via CIFS protocol using [samba].

In theory, I can share any of my Linux directories using this approach, but I decide to only share my home directory. This way, any Windows viruses will not be able to touch my Linux operating system kernels, programs or settings. This makes for a more secure platform.

Step 6: Transfer all of my files back

Here I used the external drive from "Step 0" to bring my data back to my home directory. This was a good time to re-organize my directory folders and do some [Spring cleaning].

Step 7: Re-establish my backup routine

Previously in my dual-boot configuration, I was using the TSM backup/archive client on the Windows partition to backup my C: and D: drives. Occasionally I would tar a few of my Linux directories and storage the tarball on D: so that it got included in the backup process. With my new Linux-based system, I switched over to the Linux version of TSM client. I had to re-work the include/exclude list, as the files are different on Linux than Windows.

One of my problems with the dual-boot configuration was that I had to manually boot up in Windows to do the TSM backup, which was disruptive if I was using Linux. With this new scheme, I am always running Linux, and so can run the TSM client any time, 24x7. I made this even better by automatically scheduling the backup every Monday and Thursday at lunch time.

There is no Linux support for my Maxtor BlackArmor external USB drive, but it is simple enough to LUKS-encrypt any regular external USB drive, and rsync files over. In fact, I have a fully running (and encrypted) version of my Linux system that I can boot directly from a 32GB USB memory stick. It has everyting I need except Windows (the "raw" image file didn't fit.)

I can still use Clonezilla to make a "Bare Machine Recovery" version to restore from. However, with the LVM container encrypted, this renders the compression capability worthless, and so takes a lot longer and consumes over 300GB of space on my external disk drive.

Backing up my Windows guest VM is just a matter of copying the "raw" image file to another file for safe keeping. I do this monthly, and keep two previous generations in case I get hit with viruses or "Patch Tuesday" destroys my working Windows image. Each is 30GB in size, so it was a trade-off between the number of versions and the amount of space on my hard drive. TSM backup puts these onto a system far away, for added protection.

Step 8: Protect your Encryption setup

In addition to backing up your data, there are a few extra things to do for added protection:

Add a second passphrase. The first one is the ridiculously-long one you memorize faithfully to boot the system every morning. The second one is a ridiculously-longer one that you give to your boss or admin assistant in case you get hit by a bus. In the event that your boss or admin assistant leaves the company, you can easily disable this second passprhase without affecting your original.

Backup the crypt-header. This is the small section in front that contains your passphrases, so if it gets corrupted, you would not be able to access the rest of your data. Create a backup image file and store it on an encrypted USB memory stick or external drive.

If you are one of the lucky 70,000 IBM employees switching from Windows to Linux this year, Welcome!

Continuing my coverage of the [IBM System Storage Technical University 2011], I participated in the storage free-for-all, which is a long-time tradition, started at SHARE User Group conference, and carried forward to other IT conferences. The free-for-all is a Q&A Panel of experts to allow anyone to ask any question. These are sometimes called "Birds of a Feather" (BOF). Last year, we had two: one focused on Tivoli Storage software, and the second to cover storage hardware. This year, we had two, one for System x called "Ask the eXperts", and one for System Storage called "Storage Free-for-All". This post covers the latter.

(Disclaimer: Do not shoot the messenger! We had a dozen or more experts on the panel, representing System Storage hardware, Tivoli Storage software, and Storage services. I took notes, trying to capture the essence of the questions, and the answers given by the various IBM experts. I have spelled out acronyms and provided links to relevant materials. The answers from individual IBMers may not reflect the official position of IBM management. Where appropriate, my own commentary will be in italics.)

You are in the wrong session! Go to "Ask the eXperts" session next door!

The TSM GUI sucks! Are there any plans to improve it?

Yes, we are aware that products like IBM XIV have raised the bar for what people expect from graphical user interfaces. We have plans to improve the TSM GUI. IBM's new GUI for the SAN Volume Controller and Storwize V7000 has been well-received, and will be used as a template for the GUIs of other storage hardware and software products. The GUI uses the latest HTML5, Dojo widgets and AJAX technologies, eliminating Java dependencies on the client browser.

Can we run the TSM Admin GUI from a non-Windows host?

IBM has plans to offer this. Most likely, this will be browser-based, so that any OS with a modern browser can be used.

As hard disk drives grow larger in capacity, RAID-5 becomes less viable. What is IBM doing to address this?

IBM is aware of this problem. IBM offers RAID-DP on the IBM N series, RAID-X on the IBM XIV, and RAID-6 on its other disk systems.

About 25 percent of DS8000 disk systems have SSD installed. Now that IBM DS8000 Easy Tier supports "any two" tiers, roughly 50 percent of DS8000 now have Easy Tier activated. No idea on how Easy Tier has been adopted on SVC or Storwize V7000.

We have an 8-node SVC cluster, should we put 8 SSD drives into a single node-pair, or spread them out?

We recommend putting a separate Solid-State Drive in each SVC node, with RAID-1 between nodes of a node-pair. By separating the SSD across I/O groups, you can reduce node-to-node traffic.

How well has SVC 6.2 been adopted?

The inventory call-home data is not yet available. The only SVC hardware model that does not support this level of software was the 2145-4F2 introduced in 2003. Every other model since then can be updated to this level.

Will IBM offer 600GB FDE drives for the IBM DS8700?

Currently, IBM offers 300GB and 450GB 15K RPM drives with the Full-Disk Encryption (FDE) capability for the DS8700, and 450GB and 600GB 10K RPM drives with FDE for the IBM DS8800. IBM is working with its disk suppliers to offer FDE on other disk capacities, and on SSD and NL-SAS drives as well, so that all can be used with IBM Easy Tier.

Is there a reason for the feature lag between the Easy Tier capabilities of the DS8000, and that of the SVC/Storwize V7000?

We have one team for Easy Tier, so they implement it first on DS8000, then port it over to SVC/Storwize V7000.

Does it even make sense to have separate storage tiers, especially when you factor in the cost of SVC and TPC to make it manageable?

It depends! We understand this is a trade-off between cost and complexity. Most data centers have three or more storage tiers already, so products like SVC can help simplify interoperability.

Are there best practices for combining SVC with DS8000? Can we share one DS8000 system across two or more SVC clusters?

Yes, you can share one DS8000 across multiple SVC clusters. DS8000 has auto-restripe, so consider having two big extent pools. The queue depth is 3 to 60, so aim to have up to 60 managed disks on your DS8000 assigned to SVC. The more managed disks the better.

The IBM System Storage Interopability Center (SSIC) site does not seem to be designed well for SAN Volume Controller.

Yes, we are aware of that. It was designed based on traditional Hardware Compatability Lists (HCL), but storage virtualization presents unique challenges.

How does the 24-hour learning period work for IBM Easy Tier? We have batch processing that runs from 2am to 8am on Sundays.

You can have Easy Tier monitor across this batch job window, and turn Easy Tier management between tiers on and off as needed.

Now that NetApp has acquired LSI, is the DS3000 still viable?

Yes, IBM has a strong OEM relationship with both NetApp and LSI, and this continues after the acquisition.

If have managed disks from a DS8000 multi-rank extent pool assigned to multiple SVC clusters, won't this affect performance?

Yes, possibly. Keep managed disks on seperate extent pools if this is a big concern. A PERL script is available to re-balance SVC striped volumes as needed after these changes.

Is the IBM [TPC Reporter] a replacement for IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center?

No, it is software, available at no additional charge, that provides additional reporting to those who have already licensed Tivoli Storage Productivity Center 4.1 and above. It will be updated as needed when new versions of Productivity Center are released.

We are experiencing lots of stability issues with SDD, SDD-PCM and SDD-DSM multipathing drivers. Are these getting the development attention they deserve?

If you ask a DB2 specialist, an AIX specialist, and a System Storage specialist, on how to configure System p and System Storage for optimal performance, you get three different answers. Are there any IBMers who are cross-functional that can help?

Yes, for example, Earl Jew is an IBM Field Technical Support Specialist (FTSS) for both System p and Storage, and can help you with that.

Both Oracle and Microsoft recommend RAID-10 for their applications.

Don't listen to them. Feel free to use RAID-5, RAID-6 or RAID-X instead.

IBM continues to support this for exising clients. For new deployments, IBM offers SONAS and the Information Archive (IA).

When will I be able to move SVC volumes between I/O groups?

You can today, but it is disruptive to the operating system. IBM is investigating making this less disruptive.

Will XIV ever support the mainframe?

It does already, with support for both Linux and z/VM today. For VSE support, use SVC with XIV. For those with the new zBX extension, XIV storage can be used with all of the POWER and x86-based operating systems supported. IBM has no plans to offer direct FICON attachment for z/OS or z/TPF.

Not a question - Kudos to the TSM and ProtecTIER team in supporting native IP-based replication!

Thanks!

When will IBM offer POWER-based models of the XIV, SVC and other storage devices?

IBM's decision to use industry-standard x86 technology has proven quite successful. However, IBM re-looks at this decision every so many years. Once again, the last iteration determined that it was not worth doing. A POWER-based model might not beat the price/performance of current x86 models, and maintaining two separate code bases would hinder development of new innovations.

We have both System i and System z, what is IBM doing to address the fact that PowerHA and GDPS are different?

IBM TPC-R has a service offering extension to support "IBM i" environments. GDPS plans to support multi-platform environments as well.

This was a great interactive session. I am glad everyone stayed late Thursday evening to participate in this discussion.

Well, it feels like Tuesday and you know what that means... "IBM Announcement Day!" Actually, today is Wednesday, but since Monday was Memorial Day holiday here in the USA, my week is day-shifted. Yesterday, IBM announced its latest IBM FlashCopy Manager v2.2 release. Fellow blogger, Del Hoobler (IBM) has also posted something on this out atthe [Tivoli Storage Blog].

IBM FlashCopy Manager replaces two previous products. One was called Tivoli Storage Manager for Copy Services, the other was called Tivoli Storage Manager for Advanced Copy Services. To say people were confused between these two was an understatement, the first was for Windows, and the second was for UNIX and Linux operating systems. The solution? A new product that replaces both of these former products to support Windows, UNIX and Linux! Thus, IBM FlashCopy Manager was born. I introduced this product back in 2009 in my post [New DS8700 and other announcements].

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager provides what most people with "N series SnapManager envy" are looking for: application-aware point-in-time copies. This product takes advantage of the underlying point-in-time interfaces available on various disk storage systems:

For Windows, IBM FlashCopy Manager can coordinate the backup of Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. The new version 2.2 adds support for Exchange 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. This includes the ability to recover an individual mailbox or mail item from an Exchange backup. The data can be recovered directly to an Exchange server, or to a PST file.

For UNIX and Linux, IBM FlashCopy Manager can coordinate the backup of DB2, SAP and Oracle databases. Version 2.2 adds support specific Linux and Solaris operating systems, and provides a new capability for database cloning. Basically, database cloning restores a database under a new name with all the appropriate changes to allow its use for other purposes, like development, test or education training. A new "fcmcli" command line interface allows IBM FlashCopy Manager to be used for custom applications or file systems.

A common misperception is that IBM FlashCopy Manager requires IBM Tivoli Storage Manager backup software to function. That is not true. You have two options:

Stand-alone Mode

In Stand-alone mode, it's just you, the application, IBM FlashCopy Manager and your disk system. IBM FlashCopy Manager coordinates the point-in-time copies, maintains the correct number of versions, and allows you to backup and restore directly disk-to-disk.

Unified Recovery Management with Tivoli Storage Manager

Of course, the risk with relying only on point-in-time copies is that in most cases, they are on the same disk system as the original data. The exception being virtual disks from the SAN Volume Controller. IBM FlashCopy Manager can be combined with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager so that the point-in-time copies can be copied off to a local or remote TSM server, so that if the disk system that contains both the source and the point-in-time copies fails, you have a backup copy from TSM. In this approach, you can still restore from the point-in-time copies, but you can also restore from the TSM backups as well.

Continuing my saga for my [New Laptop], I have gotten all my programs operational, and now it is a good time to re-evaluate how I organize my data. You can read my previous posts on this series: [Day 1], [Day 2], [Day 3].

I started my career at IBM developing mainframe software. The naming convention was simple, you had 44 character dataset names (DSN), which can be divided into qualifiers separated by periods. Each qualifier could be up to 8 characters long. The first qualifier was called the "high level qualifier" (HLQ) and the last one was the "low level qualifier" (LLQ). Standard naming conventions helped with ownership and security (RACF), catalog management, policy-based management (DFSMS), and data format identification. For example:

PROD.PAYROLL.JCL

TEST.PAYROLL.JCL

U.PEARSON.TEST.JCL

In the first case, we see that the HLQ is "PROD" for production, the application is PAYROLL and this file holds job control language (JCL). The LLQ often identified the file type. The second can be a version for testing a newer version of this application. The third represents user data, in which case my userid PEARSON would have my own written TEST JCL. I have seen successful naming conventions with 3, 4, 5 and even 6 qualifiers. The full dataset name remains the same, even if it is moved from one disk to another, or migrated to tape.

(We had to help one client who had all their files with single qualifier names, no more than 8 characters long, all in the Master Catalog (root directory). They wanted to implement RACF and DFSMS, and needed help converting all of their file names and related JCL to a 4-qualifer naming convention. It took seven months to make this transformation, but the client was quite pleased with the end result.)

While the mainframe has a restrictive approach to naming files, the operating systems on personal computers provide practically unlimited choices. File systems like NTFS or EXT3 support filenames as long as 254 characters, and pathnames up to 32,000 characters. The problem is that when you move a file from one disk to another, or even from one directory structure to another, the pathname will change. If you rely on the pathname to provide critical information about the meaning or purpose of a file, that could get lost when moving the files around.

I found several websites that offered organization advice. On The Happiness Project blog, Gretchen Rubin [busts 11 myths] about organization. On Zenhabits blog, Leo Babauta offers [18 De-cluttering tips].
Peter Walsh's [Tip No. 185] suggests using nouns to describe each folder. Granted these are about physical objects in your home or office, but some of the concepts can apply to digital objects on your disk drive.

"Use the computer’s sorting function. Put “AAA” (or a space) in front of the names of the most-used folders and “ZZZ” (or a bullet) in front of the least-used ones, so the former float to the top of an alphabetical list and the latter go to the bottom."

Personally, I hate spaces anywhere in directory and file names, and the thought of putting a space at the front of one to make it float to the top is even worse. Rather than resorting to naming folders with AAA or ZZZ, why not just limit the total number of files or directories so they are all visible on the screen. I often sort by date to access my most frequently-accessed or most-recently-updated files.

Of all the suggestions I found, Peter Walsh's "Use Nouns" seemed to be the most useful. Wikipedia has a fascinating article on [Biological Classification]. Certainly, if all living things can be put into classifications with only seven levels, we should not need more than seven levels of file system directory structure either! So, this is how I decided to organize my files on my new Thinkad T410:

C: Drive

Windows XP operating system programs and applications. I have structured this so that if I had to replace my hard disk entirely while traveling, I could get a new drive and restore just the operating system on this drive, and a few critical data files needed for the trip. I could then do a full recovery when I was back in the office. If I was hit with a virus that prevented Windows from booting up, I could re-install the Windows (or Linux) operating system without affecting any of my data.

D: Drive

This will be for my most active data, files and databases. I have the Windows "My Documents" point to D:\Documents directory. Under Archives, I will keep files for events that have completed, projects that have finished, and presentations I used that year. If I ever run out of space on my disk drive, I would delete or move off these archives first. I have a single folder for all Downloads, which I can then move to a more appropriate folder after I decide where to put them. My Office folder holds administrative items, like org charts, procedures, and so on.

As a consultant, many of my files relate to Events, these could be Briefings, Conferences, Meetings or Workshops. These are usually one to five days in duration, so I can hold here background materials for the clients involved, agendas, my notes on what transpired, and so on. I keep my Presentations separately, organized by topic. I also am involved with Projects that might span several months or ongoing tasks and assignments. I also keep my Resources separately, these could be templates, training materials, marketing research, whitepapers, and analyst reports.

A few folders I keep outside of this structure on the D: drive. [Evernote] is an application that provides "folksonomy" tagging. This is great in that I can access it from my phone, my laptop, or my desktop at home. Install-files are all those ZIP and EXE files to install applications after a fresh Windows install. If I ever had to wipe clean my C: drive and re-install Windows, I would then have this folder on D: drive to upgrade my system. Finally, I keep my Lotus Notes database directory on my D: drive. Since these are databases (NSF) files accessed directly by Lotus Notes, I saw no reason to put them under the D:\Documents directory structure.

Documents

Archives

2006

2007

2008

2009

Downloads

Events

Briefings

Conferences

Meetings

Workshops

Office

Presentations

Projects

Resources

Evernote

Install-Files

Notes

Data

E: Drive

This will be for my multimedia files. These don't change often, are mostly read-only, and could be restored quickly as needed.

Audio

Images

Video

I'll give this new re-organization a try. Since I have to take a fresh backup to Tivoli Storage Manager anyways, now is the best time to re-organize the directory structure and update my dsm.opt options file.

In his Backup Blog, fellow blogger Scott Waterhouse from EMC has yet another post about Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) titled [TSM and the Elephant]. He argues that only the cost of new TSM servers should be considered in any comparison, on the assumption that if you have to deploy another server, you have to attach to it fresh new disk storage, a brand new tape library, and hire an independent group of backup administrators to manage. Of course, that is bull, people use much of existing infrastructure and existing skilled labor pool every time new servers are added, as I tried to point out in my post [TSM Economies of Scale].

However, Scott does suggest that we should look at all the costs, not just the cost of a new server, which we in the industry call Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Here is an excerpt:

Final point: there is actually a really important secondary point here--what is the TCO of your backup infrastructure. In some ways, TSM is one of the most expensive (number of servers and tape drives, for example), relative to other backup applications. However, I think it would be a really interesting exercise to critically examine the TCO of the various backup applications at different scales to evaluate if there is any genuine cost differentiation between them.

Fortunately, I have a recent TCO/ROI analysis for a large customer in the Eastern United States that compares their existing EMC Legato deployment to a new proposed TSM deployment. The assessment was performed by our IBM Tivoli ROI Analyst team, using a tool developed by Alinean. The process compares the TCO of the currently deployed solution (in this case EMC Legato) with the TCO of the proposed replacement solution (in this case IBM TSM) for 55,000 client nodes at expected growth rates over a three year period, and determines the amount of investment, cost savings and other benefits, and return on investment (ROI).

Here are the results:

"A risk adjusted analysis of the proposed solution's impact was conducted and it was projected that implementing the proposed solutions resulted in $16,174,919 of 3 year cumulative benefits. Of these projected benefits, $8,015,692 are direct benefits and $8,159,227 are indirect benefits.

The proposed project is expected to help the company meet the following goals and drive the following benefits:

Reduce Business Risks $6,749,796

Consolidate and Standardize IT Infrastructure $4,975,667

Reduce IT Infrastructure Costs $2,057,107

Improve IT System Availability / Service Levels $1,409,431

Improve IT Staff Efficiency / Productivity $982,919

To implement the proposed project will require a 3 year cumulative investment of $5,760,094 including:

$0 in initial expenses

$4,650,000 in capital expenditures

$1,110,094 in operating expenditures

Comparing the costs and benefits of the proposed project using discounted cash flow analysis and factoring in a risk-adjusted discount rate of 9.5%, the proposed business case predicts:

Risk Adjusted Return on Investment (RA ROI) of 172%

Return on Investment (ROI) of 181%

Net Present Value (NPV) savings of $8,425,014

Payback period of 9.0 month(s)

Note: The project has been risk-adjusted for an overall deployment schedule of 5 months."

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager uses less bandwidth, fewer disk and tape storage resources than EMC Legato. For even a large deployment of this kind, payback period is only NINE MONTHS. Generally, if you can get a new proposed investment to have less than 24 month payback period you have enough to get both CFO and CIO excited, so this one is a no-brainer.

Perhaps this helps explain why TSM enjoys such a larger marketshare than EMC Legato in the backup software marketplace. No doubt Scott might be able to come up with a counter-example, a very small business with fewer than 10 employees where an EMC Legato deployment might be less expensive than a comparable TSM deployment. However, when it comes to scalability, TSM is king. The majority of the Fortune 1000 companies use Tivoli Storage Manager, and IBM uses TSM internally for its own IT, managed storage services, and cloud computing facilities.

I saw this as an opportunity to promote the new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager v6.1 which offers a variety of new scalability features, and continues to provide excellent economies of scale for large deployments, in my post [IBM has scalable backup solutions].

"So does TSM scale? Sure! Just add more servers. But this is not an economy of scale. Nothing gets less expensive as the capacity grows. You get a more or less linear growth of costs that is directly correlated to the growth of primary storage capacity. (Technically, it costs will jump at regular and predictable intervals, by regular and predictable and equal amounts, as you add TSM servers to the infrastructure--but on average it is a direct linear growth. Assuming you are right sized right now, if you were to double your primary storage capacity, you would double the size of the TSM infrastructure, and double your associated costs.)"

I talked about inaccurate vendor FUD in my post [The murals in restaurants], and recently, I saw StorageBod's piece, [FUDdy Waters]. So what would "economies of scale" look like? Using Scott's own words:

Without Economies of Scale

"If it costs you $5 to backup a given amount of data, it probably costs you $50 to back up 10 times that amount of data, and $500 to back up 100 times that amount of data."

With Economies of Scalee

"If anybody can figure out how to get costs down to $40 for 10 times the amount of data, and $300 for 100 times the amount of data, they will have an irrefutable advantage over anybody that has not been able to leverage economies of scale."

So, let's do some simple examples. I'll focus on a backup solution just for employee workstations, each employee has 100GB of personal data to backup on their laptop or PC. We'll look at a one-person company, a ten-person company, and a hundred-person company.

Case 1: The one-person company

Here the sole owner needs a backup solution. Here are all the steps she might perform:

Spend hours of time evaluating different backup products available, and make sure her operating system, file system and applications are supported

Spend hours shopping for external media, this could be an external USB disk drive, optical DVD drive, or tape drive, and confirm it is supported by the selected backup software.

Spend time learning the product, purchase "Backup for Dummies" or similar book, and/or taking a training class.

Install and configure the software

Operate the software, or set it up to run automatically, and take the media offsite at the end of the day, and back each morning

Case 2: The ten-person company

I guess if each of the ten employees went off and performed all of the same steps as above, there would be no economies of scale.
Fortunately, co-workers are amazingly efficient in avoiding unnecessary work.

Rather than have all ten people evaluate backup solutions, have one person do it. If everyone runs the same or similar operating system, file systems and applications, this can be done about the same as the one-person case.

Ditto on the storage media. Why should 10 people go off and evaluate their own storage media. One person can do it for all ten people in about the same time as it takes for one person.

Purchasing the software and hardware. Ok, here is where some costs may be linear, depending on your choices. Some software vendors give bulk discounts, so purchasing 10 seats of the same software could be less than 10 times the cost of one license. As for storage hardware, it might be possible to share drives and even media. Perhaps one or two storage systems can be shared by the entire team.

For a lot of backup software, most of the work is in the initial set up, then it runs automatically afterwards. That is the case for TSM. You create a "dsm.opt" file, and it can list all of the include/exclude files and other rules and policies. Once the first person sets this up, they share it with their co-workers.

Hopefully, if storage hardware was consolidated, such that you have fewer drives than people, you can probably have fewer people responsible for operations. For example, let's have the first five employees sharing one drive managed by Joe, and the second five employees sharing a second drive managed by Sally. Only two people need to spend time taking media offsite, bringing it back and so on.

Case 3: The hundred-person company

Again, it is possible that a hundred-person company consists of 10 departments of 10 people each, and they all follow the above approach independently, resulting in no economies of scale. But again, that is not likely.

Here one or a few people can invest time to evaluate backup solutions. Certainly far less than 100 times the effort for a one-person company.

Same with storage media. With 100 employees, you can now invest in a tape library with robotic automation.

Purchase of software and hardware. Again, discounts will probably apply for large deployments. Purchasing 1 tape library for all one hundred people is less than 10 times the cost and effort of 10 departments all making independent purchases.

With a hundred employees, you may have some differences in operating system, file systems and applications. Still, this might mean two to five versions of dsm.opt, and not 10 or 100 independent configurations.

Operations is where the big savings happen. TSM has "progressive incremental backup" so it only backs up changed data. Other backup schemes involve taking period full backups which tie up the network and consume a lot of back end resources. In head-to-head comparisons between IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and Symantec's NetBackup, IBM TSM was shown to use significantly less network LAN bandwidth, less disk storage capacity, and fewer tape cartridges than NetBackup.

The savings are even greater with data deduplication. Either using hardware, like IBM TS76750 ProtecTIER data deduplication solution, or software like the data deduplication capability built-in with IBM TSM v6.1, you can take advantage of the fact that 100 employees might have a lot of common data between them.

So, I have demonstrated how savings through economies of scale are achieved using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Adding one more person in each case is cheaper than the first person. The situation is not linear as Scott suggests. But what about larger deployments? IBM TS3500 Tape Library can hold one PB of data in only 10 square feet of data center floorspace. The IBM TS7650G gateway can manage up to 1 PB of disk, holding as much as 25 PB of backup copies. IT Analysts Tony Palmer, Brian Garrett and Lauren Whitehouse from Enterprise Strategy Group tried IBM TSM v6.1 out for themselves and wrote up a ["Lab Validation"] report. Here is an excerpt:

"Backup/recovery software that embeds data reduction technology can address all three of these factors handily. IBM TSM 6.1 now has native deduplication capabilities built into its Extended Edition (EE) as a no-cost option. After data is written to the primary disk pool, a deduplication operation can be scheduled to eliminate redundancy at the sub-file level. Data deduplication, as its name implies, identifies and eliminates redundant data.

TSM 6.1 also includes features that optimize TSM scalability and manageability to meet increasingly demanding service levels resulting from relentless data growth. The move from a proprietary back-end database to IBM DB2 improves scalability, availability, and performance without adding complexity; the DB2 database is automatically maintained and managed by TSM. IBM upgraded the monitoring and reporting capabilities to near real-time and completely redesigned the dashboard that provides visibility into the system. TSM and TSM EE include these enhanced monitoring and reporting capabilities at no cost."

The majority of Fortune 1000 customers use IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, and it is the backup software that IBM uses itself in its own huge data centers, including the cloud computing facilities. In combination with IBM Tivoli FastBack for remote office/branch office (ROBO) situations, and complemented with point-in-time and disk mirroring hardware capabilities such as IBM FlashCopy, Metro Mirror, and Global Mirror, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager can be an effective, scalable part of a complete Unified Recovery Management solution.

IBM had over a dozen storage-related announcements this week. This is my third and final part in my series to provide a quick overview of the announcements.

IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager v6.3

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is market-leading software that provides not just backup, but also HSM and archive capabilities across a wide variety of operating systems. Originally developed in the IBM Almaden Research Center, it then moved about 15 years ago to Tucson to become a commercial product.

The new TSM v6.3 introduces site-to-site hot-standby disaster recovery feature that replicates the TSM meta data and data for fast recovery. The maximum number of objects supported has doubled to four billion. Reporting has been enhanced using technologies borrowed from IBM Cognos. Lastly, a feature on Tivoli Storage Productivity Center has been carried forward to deploy and update agents on the various clients.

IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager coordinates application-aware backups through the use of point-in-time copy services such as FlashCopy or Snapshot on various IBM and non-IBM disk systems. The versions can remain on disk, or optionally processed by Tivoli Storage Manager to move them to external storage such as tape for added protection.

There will always be a spot in my heart for this product, as the method to use FlashCopy for application-aware backups on the mainframe was my 19th patent, and subsequently delivered as a series of enhancements to DFSMS over the past decade on the z/OS operating system. It is good to see this innovation has "jumped over" to distributed systems.

The new FlashCopy Manager v3.1 adds support for HP-UX and VMware, expands support for IBM DB2 and Oraqcle databases, and introduces an interface for custom business applications.

TSM for VE is a new addition to the TSM family, focused on being able to coordinate hypervisor-aware data protection. Initially it supports VMware, but IBM has plans to support a variety of other server virtualization hypervisors as well, as over 40 percent of companies run two or more hypervisors in their data center.

The new TSM for VE v6.3 adds a VMware vCenter plug-in, and support for hardware-based disk snapshots.

IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v4.2.2

A long time ago, I was the chief architect IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center v1, now we are already up to v4.2.2 release!

IBM has added enhanced reporting based on IBM Cognos technology, including storage tiering analysis reports (STAR). Few companies keep all of their storage tiers in a single disk system. Rather, they have different boxes, and often from different vendors. IBM's Productivity Center can report on both IBM and non-IBM disk systems. New this release is support for the internal disks of the Storwize V7000 midrange disk system.

Productivity Center's "SAN Planner" has been enhanced to consider XIV replication criteria. This SAN Planner helps clients decide where to carve LUNs, and to make sure they pick the right place given all of the criteria such as remote copy replications.

Last year, we introduced Productivity Center for Disk Midrange Edition (MRE) which to offer lower price when you are only managing midrange disk systems DS5000, DS3000, Storwize V7000 and SVC managing these. This was so successful, that we now have TPC Select, which is basically Productivity Center Standard Edition (SE) for these midrange disk systems.

Whew! I have already heard from some of my readers to slow down, that this is too much information to deal with all at once. IBM has tried everything from having just a few announcements nearly every Tuesday, to having huge launches every two to three years, and settled in the middle with announcements about four to five times per year.

During lunch, people were able to take a look at our solutions. Here are Dan Thompson and Brett Cooper striking a pose.

Hyper-Efficient Backup and Recovery

The afternoon was kicked off by Dr. Daniel Sabbah, IBM General Manager of Tivoli software. He started with some shocking statistics: 42 percent of small companies have experienced data loss, 32 percent have lost data forever. IBM has a solution that offers "Unified Recovery Management". This involves a combination of periodic backups, frequent snapshots, and remote mirroring.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) was introduced in 1993, and was the first backup software solution to support backup to disk storage pools. Today, TSM is now also part of Cloud Computing services, including IBM Information Protection Services. IBM announced today a new bundle called IBM Storwize Rapid Application Backup, which combines IBM Storwize V7000 midrange disk system, Tivoli FlashCopy Manager, implementation services, with a full three-year hardware and software warranty. This could be used, for example, to protect a Microsoft Exchange email system with 9000 mailboxes.

IBM also announced that its TS7600 ProtecTIER data deduplication solutions have been enhanced to support many-to-many bi-direction remote mirroring. Last year, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) reported that they were average 24x data deduplication factor in their environment using IBM ProtecTIER.

"You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape!"
-- Dick Crosby, Director of System Administration, Estes

The new IBM TS1140 enterprise class tape drive process 2.3 TB per hour, and provides a density of 1.2 PB per square foot. The new 3599 tape media can hold 4TB of data uncompressed, which could hold up to 10TB at a 2.5x compression ratio.

The United States Golfers Association [USGA] uses IBM's backup cloud, which manages over 100PB of data from 750 locations across five continents.

Customer Testimonial - Graybar

Randy Miller, Manager of Technical System Administration at Graybar, provided the next client testimonial. Graybar is an employee-owned company focused on supply-chain management, serving as a distributor for electical, lighting, security, power and cooling equipment.

Their problem was that they had 240 different locations, and expecting local staff to handle tape backups was not working out well. They centralized their backups to their main data center. In the event that a system fails in one of their many remote locations, they can rebuild a new machine at their main data center across high-speed LAN, and then ship overnight to the remote location. The result, the remote location has a system up and running by 10:30am, faster than they would have had from local staff trying to figure out how to recover from tape. In effect, Graybar had implemented a "private cloud" for backup in the 1990s, long before the concept was "cool" or "popular".

In 2001, they had an 18TB SAP ERP application data repository. To back this up, they took it down for 1 minute per day, six days a week, and 15 minutes down on Sundays. The result was less than 99.8 percent availability. To fix this, they switched to XIV, and use Snapshots that are non-disruptive and do not impact application performance.

Over 85 percent of the servers at Graybar are virtualized.

Their next challenge is Disaster Recovery. Currently, they have two datacenters, one in St. Louis and the other in Kansas City. However, in the aftermath of Japan's earthquakes, they realize there is a nuclear power plan between their two locations, so a single incident could impact both data centers. They are working with IBM, their trusted advisors, to investigate a three-site solution.

This week, May 15-22, I am in Auckland, New Zealand teaching IBM Storage Top Gun sales class. Next week, I will be in Sydney, Australia.

It's Tuesday again, and that means one thing.... IBM Announcements! On the heels of [last week's announcements], IBM announced some additional products of interest to storage administrators.

IBM Information Archive

Back in 2008, IBM [unveiled the Information Archive]. This storage solution provides automated policy-based tiering between disk and tape, with non-erasable non-rewriteable enforcement to protect against unethical tampering of data. The initial release supported [both files and object storage], with support for different collections, each with its own set of policies for management. However, it only supported NFS initially for the file protocol. Today, IBM announces the addition of CIFS protocol support, which will be especially helpful in healthcare and life sciences, as much of the medical equipment is designed for CIFS protocol storage.

Also, Information Archive will now provide a full index and search feature capability to help with e-Discovery. Searches and retrievals can be done in the background without disrupting applications or the archiving operations.

To minimize impact to the VMware host, TSM for VE make use of non-disruptive snapshots and offload the backup processing to a vStorage backup server. This supports file-level recovery, volume-level recovery, and full VM recovery. Of course, since it is based on TSM v6, you get advanced storage efficiency features such as compression and deduplication to minimize consumption of disk storage pools.

IBM Tivoli Monitor has been extended to support virtual servers, including VMware, Linux KVM, and Citrix XenServer. This can help with capacity planning, performance monitoring, and availability. Tivoli Monitor will help you understand the relationships between physical and virtual resources to help isolate problems to the correct resource, reducing the time it takes for debug issues between servers and storage. See the
[announcement letter].

Next week is [IBM Pulse2011 Conference] in Las Vegas, February 27 to March 2. Sorry, I don't plan to be there this year. It is looking to be a great conference, with fellow inventor Dean Kamen as the keynote speaker. For a blast from the past, read my blog posts from Pulse2008 [Main Tent sessions] and [Breakout sessions].

Since Clod Barrera introduced IBM's Smarter Computing initiative during yesterday's keynote session, I took it to the next lower level, with a presentation on how IBM's Storage Strategy aligns with the Smarter Computing approach.

Deduplication -- It's Not Magic, It's Math!

Local IBMer Paul Rizio presented this high-level session on the concepts of data deduplication, and how it is implemented in IBM's N series, TSM and ProtecTIER virtual tape libraries. I first met Paul earlier this year when we were both instructors at Top Gun classes we held in Auckland, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia.

IBM Information Archive for files, email and eDiscovery

This was a reprise of my presentation that I gave last July in Orlando, Florida (see my blog post [IBM Storage University - Day 1]). I explained the differences between backup and archive, the differences between Tivoli Storage Manager and System Storage Archive Manager, and the Information Archive (IA) The Information Archive for files, email and eDiscovery bundle combines IA hardware with content collectors for files and email, eDiscovery analyzer and eDiscovery manager software.

What are Industry Consultants saying about IBM Storage?

Vic Peltz, from our IBM Almaden Research Center, presented this lively presentation on how IT industry analysts gather their information and structure their findings into various models. For many in the audience, this would be their first exposure to concepts like a "Magic Quadrant", "MarketScope" and the various stages of the "Hype Cycle".

IBM SONAS and the Smart Business Storage Cloud

The title of this session just rolls off my tongue, similar to "James and the Giant Peach" or "Harold and the Purple Crayon". I had presented this back in July (see my blog post [IBM Storage University - Cloud Storage]). This time, I had updated the materials to reflect the new SONAS R1.3 release, and the new IBM SmartCloud offerings announced last month.

Of course the big news is that U.S. President Barack Obama is here in Australia, with a stop in Canberra (not far from Melbourne), followed by a stop in Darwin on the north side of this country. This is his first official visit to Australia as president.

A lot was announced this week, so I decided to break it up into several separate posts. This is part 3 in my 3-part series, focusing on our Tivoli Storage products.
To read the rest of the series, see:

The latest release of FlashCopy Manager now supports NetApp and IBM N series storage devices. This provides application-aware snapshots, coordinated with applications like SAP, DB2 and Oracle.

FlashCopy Manager now integrates with Metro and Global Mirror capabilities, so that application-consistent copies are available at remote sites for disaster recovery, or to off-load the FlashCopy destination copy from disk to Tivoli Storage Manager storage pools.

Tivoli Storage Manager v6.4

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager is part of IBM's Unifed Recovery Management. Here are some highlights:

TSM for ERP. I remember when these were called "Tivoli Data Protection" modules. We still refer to them as "TDPs". The TSM for ERP provides backup capability for SAP environments, and this latest release adds support for in-memory SAP HANA databases.

TSM for Virtualization Environments IBM TSM is famous for its patented "Progressive Incremental Backup" which is far more efficient than full+incrementals or full+differentials. IBM now extends this method to VM images. With people consolidating more and more VMs onto fewer host servers, TSM-VE now offers multiple backup streams in parallel. TSM-VE can now take application-aware backups of Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, and Active Directory running in VMs. TSM-VE will also support vApp and VM templates. If it takes you [a day and a half to build a VMware template], you would want to make sure all that work was backed up, right?

Congratulations to my colleague and close friend, Harley Puckett, who celebrated his 25th anniversary of service here at IBM. This is known internally as joining the "Quarter Century Club" or QCC. This is not just a figure of speech, the members of this club hold get-togethers and barbeques throughout the year.

Here is Harley welcoming Ken Hannigan and others he worked with back in Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) software development.

Continuing my coverage of the Data Center 2010 conference, Tuesday morning I attended several sessions. The first was a serious IT discussion with Mazen Rawashdeh, Technology Executive from eBay, and the second was a lighthearted review of the benefits from Cloud Computing from humorist Dave Barry, and the third focused on re-architecting backup strategies.

eBay – How One Fast Growing Company is Solving its Infrastructure and Data Center Challenges

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." -- Charles Darwin

So far, this has been the best session I have attended. eBay operates in 32 countries in seven languages, helping 90 million users to buy or sell 245 million items in 50,000 categories. Let's start with some statistics of the volume of traffic that eBay handles:

$2000 traded every second

cell phone sold every six seconds

pair of shoes sold every nine seconds

a major appliance sold every minute

93 billion database actions every day

50 TB of daily ingested daily

code changes to the eBay application are rolled in every day

In 2007, eBay discovered a disturbing trend, that infrastructure costs matched linear growth to business listing volume, which was an unsustainable model. Mazen Rawashdeh, eBay Marketplace Technology Operations, presented their strategy to break free from this problem. They want to double the number of listings without doubling their costs. They are 2 years into their 4 year plan:

Switched from expensive 12U high servers consuming 3 Kilowatts over to open source software on commodity 1-2U server hardware. Mazen owns all the costs from cement floor up to the web server.

Replaced team-optimized key performance indicators (KPI) with a common KPI. The server team focused on transactions per minute. The storage team was focused on utilization. The network team was focused on MB/sec bandwidth. The problem is that changes to optimize one might have negative impact to other teams. The new KPI was "Watts per listing" that allowed all teams to focus on a common goal.

Focused on changing the corporate culture for communicating clear measurable goals so that everyone understands the why and how of this new KPI. You have to spend money to save money in the long run. Consider costs at least 36 months out.

Changed from purchasing servers and depreciating them over 3 years to a lease model with server replacement tech refresh every 18 months. It is a bad idea to keep IT equipment after full depreciation, as energy savings alone on new equipment easily justifies 18-month replacement.

Adopted storage tiers. Storage is purchased not leased because it is more difficult to swap out disk arrays. They have 10-40 PB of disk. They do not use traditional backup, but rather use disk replication across distant locations. They are quick to delete or archive data that does not belong on their production systems.

Their results so far? They have reduced the Watts per listing by 70 percent over the past two years. They were able to double their volume with a relatively flat IT budget.

The Wit and Wisdom of Dave Barry, Humorist and Author

Dave Barry is a humor columnist. For 25 years he was a syndicated columnist whose work appeared in more than 500 newspapers in the United States and abroad, including the [Funny Times] that I subscribe to. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary about the election and politics in general. Dave has also written a total of 30 books, of which two of his books were used as the basis for the CBS TV sitcom "Dave's World," in which Harry Anderson played a much taller version of Dave.

I first met Dave about ten years ago at a SHARE conference in Minneapolis, MN. It was good to see him again.

Backup and Beyond

The analyst covered the "Three C's" of backup: cost, capability and complexity. There are many ways to implement backup, and he predicts that 30 percent of all companies will re-evaluate and re-architect their backup strategy, or at least change their backup software, by 2014 to address these three issues. Another survey indicates that 43 percent of companies are considering backup the primary reason they are investigating public cloud service providers.

The top three primary backup software vendors for the audience were Symantec, IBM, and Commvault. An interactive poll of the audience offered some insight:

There appears to be shift away from using disk to emulate tape (Virtual Tape Library) and instead use direct disk interfaces.

Some of the recommended actions were:

Exploit backup software features. On average, people keep 11 versions of backup, try cutting this down to four versions. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager allows this to be done via management class policies.

Implement a separate archive. Once data is archived and backed up, it reduces the backup load of production systems. Any chance to backup semi-static data less frequently will help.

Switch to capacity-based pricing which will allow more flexibility on server options to run backup software.

Implement data deduplication and compression, such as with IBM ProtecTIER data deduplication solution.

Consider a tiered recovery approach, where less critical applications have less backup protection. Many keep 1-2 years of backups, but 90 percent of all recoveries are for backups from the most recent 27 days. Reduce backup retention to 90 days.

While the conference is divided into seven major tracks, it quickly becomes obvious that many of these IT datacenter issues overlap, and that approaches and decisions in one area can easily impact other areas.